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The Relations of Thought and Language
A proper conception of the relations of an idea and its medium of expression, is of Trimary importance. As the question belongs both to Linguistics and to Logic, we shall cite authorities from both sciences. (1) Language and Thought Separable.—After show¬ing that thought is antecedent to expression, Professor Whitney says : "Language, then, is the spoken means whereby thought is communicated, and it is only that. Language is not thought, nor is thought language ; nor is there a mysterious and indissc¬tnble connection between the two, as there is between riul and body, so that the one cannot exist and manifest itself without the other: There can hardly be a greater and more pernicious error, in linguistics or in metaphysics, than the doctrine that language and thought are identical. . . The body would be neither comfortable nor comely, if not clad ; cotton and wool would be of little use, but for machinery making quick and cheap their conversion into cloth ; and, in a truly analogous way, thought would be awkward, feeble, and indistinct, without the dress, the apparatus, which is afforded by language. Our denial of the identity of thought with its expression does not com¬pel us to abate one jot or tittle of the exceeding value of speech to thought ; it only puts that value upon its proper basis."* (2) Language an Aid to Thought. — Although thought and its expression are distinct, words furnish an Indispensable aid to intricate or long continued thinking. The manner in which assistance is afforded is thus illustrated by Sir William Hamilton : "A coun¬try may be overrun by an armed host, but it is only conquered by the establishment of fortresses. Words are the fortresses of thought. They enable us to re¬alize our dominion oyer what we have already overrun in thought ; to make every intellectual conquest the basis of operations for others still beyond. Or another illustration : You have all heard of the process of tun¬neling through a sand-bank. In this operation it is impossible to succeed, unless every foot, nay almost every inch in our progress, be secured by an arch of masonry, before we attempt the excavation of another. Now, language is to the mind precisely what the arch is to the tunnel. The power of thinking and the power of excavating are not dependent on the word in the one case, on the mason-work in the other; Gut without these subsidiaries, neither process could be carried on beyond its rudimentary commencement. Though, therefore, we allow that every movement for¬ward in language must be determined by an antecedent movement forward in thought ; still, unless thought be accompanied at each point of evolution, by a corre¬sponding evolutiol: of language, its further develop. ment is arrested."* (3) Language Abbreviates Thinking. — In addi tion to their recording power, but growing out of it, is the power of words to take the place of a complex conception, and thus to become an object of thought, or thought itself. Leibnitz was the first to distinguish between symbolical and intuitive conceptions. When our notion of an object consists of a clear insight into all its essential attributes, it is intuitive. When, on the contrary, our notion is so complex that we do not at once realize all its properties, it is symbolical. When we use the words state, church, deity, designating com¬plex notions which we fully realize only after analysis, the word, and not what it signifies, is the thought. If we use the word in a single sense, and the propositions containing it are true, such a symbol abbreviates the processes of thought without inaccuracy. (4) Language Vitiates Thought.— Meaningless combinations often result from the union of sym¬bols instead of things. This was the error of the Schoolmen, who toyed with the signs of things with¬ut comparing things themselves. Much of the so. called "subjective poetry" is of this description. Such is Dryden's stanza : "From harmony, from heavenly harmony This universal frame began ; From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man." "In these sonorous lines," Dr. Campbell Len "there is not even a glimpse of meaning." (5) Language an Instrument of Analysis.—The eye conveys to the mind an impression of an action as a whole, but language is necessarily analytic. This important property of language has been described as follows by Archbishop Thomson : "As the mind does not receive impressions passively, but reflects upon them, decomposes them into their elements, and corn- pares them with notions already stored up, language, the close-fitting dress of our thoughts, is always analyt¬ical,—it does not body forth a mere picture of facts, but displays the working of the mind upon the facts submitted to it, with the order in which it regards them. This analysis has place even in the simplest descriptions. The bird is flying' is an account of one object which we behold, and in its present condi¬tion. But the object was single, while our description calls up two notions—' bird' and 'flying,'—and it is plain that this difference is the result of an analysis which the mind has performed, separating, in thought, the bird from its present action of flying, and then mentioning them together. In painting and sculpture, on the contrary, we have languages that do not employ analysis ; and a picture or statue would be called by some a synthetic, or compositive sign, from the notion that in it all the elements and qualities of the object which would have been mentioned separately in a de.. scription, are thrown together and represented at one view. The statue of the Dying Gladiator gives at )ne glance all the principal qualities so finely analyzed by the following description, which, however, includes also the poet's reflections upon and inferences from the qualities he observes ; the -,bjective impression is described, but with a development of the subjective condition into which it throws the narrator. "I see before me the Gladiator lie: He leans upon his hand—his manly brow Consents to death but conquers agony. And his drooped head sinks gradually low— And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow From the red gash, fall heavy one by one, Like the first of a thunder shower ; and now The arena swims around him—he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won. "He heard it, but he heeded not—his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away ; He reeked not of the life he lost, nor prize, But where his rude hut by the Danube lay : There were his young barbarians all at play, There was their Dacian mother—he, their sire, Butchered to make a Roman holiday! All this rushed with his blood—shall he expire And unavenged ? Arise ye Goths, and glut your ire! RTEON. Here the analysis of the impression is carried to its farthest ; and in the second stanza the object be¬comes quite subordinate to the inferences and fancies of the subject. But it is all the more striking as an illustration of the principle, that language presents to us the analysis, as painting and sculpture the imita¬tions, of a sensible impression." * With the progress of the human intellect, language becomes less synthetic and more analytic, in order to express new distinctions.